Thursday, March 17, 2016

Is it spring yet?

Leaves are starting to show up on the trees! The weather is warming up, and I'm enjoying being able to wear my vest(s) out without needing a full coat to cover up.

We've been making crafts to decorate and hurry spring along at work. I'm pretty pleased with how this project turned out:

For my February pair of socks, I successfully finished a pair of simple stockinette while watching a whole mess of movies at the theater. The fancy yarn fooled many a person into thinking I was accomplishing some amazing feat of handiwork - to the untrained eye, it really gives of the impression of colorwork.

The knitting was completely mindless, the only tricky part being when it came time to place the heels. Even that was not too difficult - just a bit fiddly, perhaps.

I finished them just in time to wear for the Oscars. (By the way, Chris Rock did an amazing job.)

I've been working on a prayer shawl using a stitch from a fairly new acquisition of Sequence Knitting. For my rather utilitarian purposes, I think the concept of sequence knitting has a good bit of potential to take on new energy when wedded with a prayer or mantra. This particular pattern is working pretty well, and when other knitting becomes to difficult, this is a nice project to return to.

Speaking of difficult project, I've been working hard on my March socks. This yarn has already given me lots of trouble (at no fault of the yarn, mind you) in the past, and I am struggling to make it work. I think my latest solution may work, but time will tell.

The leg of the sock is pretty tight, and I had to tweak some things to modify that. I had departed from the pattern after working the leg, since I wanted to knit a padded heel. The problem there is that the heel ends up rather short, due to all the slipped stitches. After knitting a typically pretty deep heel, I determined that I needed a section of short rows to extend the slipped-stitch section. That led me to Cat Bordi's Padded Sweet Tomato Sock Heel.

I'll get there.

The good news is that I have a beautiful FO to share. I call it my "Love Wins" scarf because I picked up the yarn at Churchmouse Yarns & Teas the day the Supreme Court made a decision in favor of marriage equality.

I knit it in the round, improvising the widths for each color. To finish, I worked each end with a few rounds of garter stitch and a 3-needle bindoff. I love the result!

Now I have a scarf that will coordinate with a whole mess of colors! And such happy colors they are! The yarn is Rowan Fine Tweed, and it gave me a beautiful rainbow just in time to go looking for a pot of gold.

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A Smidgen of Knitterly Jargon

FO - Finished Object

UFO - Unfinished Object

WIP - Work In Progress

KAL - Knit-a-long; knitters near or far unite over a common project/theme, and more-or-less simultaneously progress through the project. Done well, it can be a very nice way to stay connected over long distances... kinda like watching the same movie while staying on the phone does for long-distance dating. It's a shared process.

frog - I appeal to Theresa Vinson Stenersen's explanation in this article

rip - unraveling your knitting by removing the needle and yanking on the working yarn

tink - undoing your knitting one stitch at a time by reversing the knitting process ("knit" spelled backwards)